crispy2000

Here's some harder news:

Michigan officials say they can not reconcile vote counts in 610 of 1,680 precincts, or 59% of the precincts, in Michigan’s largest county , Wayne County, which Hillary won by a margin of 2 to 1 over Donald Trump because the original vote counts in the poll books do not match the number of votes in the machine printout reports.

Specifically, the number of votes recorded by the voting machines were higher than the number of voters that were logged into to vote in these precincts.

http://alexanderhiggins.com/vote-fraud-12-michigan-hillary-v...

How difficult is it to hack the electronic voting system the US uses for elections?

"The electronic voting system" doesn't exist. There are multiple types of machines, software, etc. throughout the US. Some of these have proven to have significant vulnerabilities. In addition, the local boards of elections likely have rollup systems which could be compromised as well. "Insider threats" are another possibility-- for example, throw out some portion of the ballots in a precinct that's strongly on one side or another. Voter- and registration fraud are some of the easiest hacks to perform.

What hacking do you think took place during the election?

It's quite possible that some of each of these occurred somewhere during the election. They've detected some non-citizens who voted, for example.

The net effect of "hacking", and of innocent errors is likely insignificant, given the hard-working and careful volunteers who man the precincts at election time.

Disagree. Having one or two "legacy" ports decreases the disruption when upgrading, particularly if the user has some oddball peripherals. This is why API's have deprecated functions for a while, allowing users a bit of extra time to upgrade before they're left out in the cold.

Not sure having the government run a standards-making organization is the best idea. From the NIH storing smallpox vials, the NSA hoarding zero-day exploits, the infamous Obamacare website, to the OPM hack, the government might not be the right folks to LEAD the effort. It's not clear that a central organization would be more effective than federations of industry and government players.

Had to laugh at the thought of Austin as too conservative.

And given that both Uber and Lyft have headquarters in San Francisco, they could hardly be less "tax-fleeing"!

Didn't assume either 1, 2, nor 3. 1. Perhaps your definition of "compensated sufficiently" doesn't jibe with those of the thousands of drivers who voluntarily choose to drive for Uber and similar services. 2. SOME consumers consider their time too valuable to take public transportation as you have defined it. 3. I mentioned light rail AND buses in my decidedly non-encyclopedic comment about efficiency of ridesharing. Those are two of the main options currently available in Austin.

Definitely, "the solution is a mix", but the components and proportions of that mix are best left to the consumers, not solely to central planners, whether in governments or in large corporations. Indeed, since the vote, local rideshare companies have sprung up in Austin, perhaps better suited to the needs of Austinites.

More efficient? By what measurement? Certainly not the consumer's time nor the taxpayers' money!

Billion dollar light rail trains that roll empty are not a terribly efficient use of money. Buses are more flexible, but waiting for a bus then having to walk from the bus stop home is apparently an unsatisfactory use of time to many passengers.

A system that connects a passenger with the nearest available driver and doesn't take too much for their part in the transaction would seem to be efficient in time and money for both the passenger and driver. In addition, it provides a source of employment for people who are looking for work and meet the criteria.

Not saying that Uber, Lyft, and other "ride sharing" services are all on the side of the angels, but their success points to a need which they are meeting.

Not sure about Germany, but in Austin, Uber wanted their drivers to carry auto insurance, although the company also has its own policy to cover drivers--many personal auto insurance policies explicitly do not cover accidents while the insured party is driving for hire.

It's a matter of risk.

With AirBnB the customer is going into the "vendor's" home. With Handy, the vendor is entering the customer's home.

While there have been incidents of bad AirBnB hosts, there has probably been a lot more cases of bad behaviour by the customers, and extensive screening before the transaction would probably be a deal-breaker.

A thief working through Handy could cause loads of problem for them, since they could get into several houses every day.

Misleading title in article.

The 3D printers are being used to make card skimmers. Almost any kind of plastic blank can be used to make mag-stripe credit cards.

The article says: "Unfortunately, these trends point to more credit card details being out there thanks to 3D printers and the ease of which they enable scammers to build card skimming devices."

Summary: the "sharing economy" is awful because companies such as Uber and AirBnb profit from facilitating the transaction between the consumer and the provider. To quote: "The capital of the lower classes is used as a certificate signalling employment-worthiness, then is used to generate revenue for those who can afford to rent it out in mass to create products for consumers. The profits made are not returned to those who own the capital, but rather to those who own the information technology company which rents the capital."

Of course, this makes it sound like the Uber driver and AirBnb host are slaves of the big corporations.

In reality, drivers can select times when there is greater demand and thus, higher rates. AirBnb hosts can set their own rates, and are subject to market realities. In addition, either is able to sign up with a competitive services, e.g. Lyft or Homeaway.

You could also look at the Bitcoin blockchain, e.g. on the blockchain.info web site. There is a new block generated every 10 minutes or so. Some useful fields in the block include the nonce (a 32-bit unsigned) or the block hash. You can set a target time and say that the first block generated on x-date (UTC) will be used. Blockchain.info and some others like it have a free API.

Being below sea level hasn't particularly bothered the Dutch. Half of Holland is at least a meter below sea level.

Of course, in the 1200's when they started, they didn't have climate change conferences and carbon credits.

The article does (quietly) mention that the sea level rise in the Marshall is due to changes in the trade winds. They also mention that they are not sure of the relationship between global warming and these trade wind changes. Over the last century the Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) has risen 4-8 inches.

The Marshall Islanders would be better served if the Paris meeting had been called off, and the millions that were spent for food, fuel, lodging, and security could be sent to keep their islands from capsizing ;-) not to mention the savings in CO2...

We agree it's worthy of debate, not merely a hand-waving assertion.

In the 18th century, the French Academy of Science published their consensus that there were no rocks that fell from the sky because there are manifestly no rocks in the sky. So European museums threw out their collections of meteorites.

The report did not examine the impact of outside money on the messages of groups that encourage activism on climate change. Farrell suggested that there were qualitative differences...

It would have been (more) scientific to compare the two factions. There's plenty of money to be made on both sides of the issue--ask any lawyer.

One of the best programmes on offer (...). A class of primary-aged children ‘“adopts” a real live baby for the year (I’m not joking). Every few weeks the baby visits the class with a parent and programme instructor. The kids sit around the baby and start talking about it – Why is she crying? Why is she laughing, or looking back to her mother when reaching for the toy? The children are trying to empathise – to step into the baby’s shoes.

Many do this without needing government programmes. It's called family: siblings and cousins.

Reinventing the wheel?

This is how it starts: "I became fascinated by fungi when I was a student, and so I decided to do a PhD in fungal genetics. By the end of my PhD I learned through watching BBC’s Planet Earth that certain fungi are able to manipulate insect behavior followed by the growth of beautiful fruiting bodies, leaving behind a rather morbid piece of natural art. The concept of a microbe being able to manipulate an animal’s brain just blew my mind. Ever since, I’ve been working to make the “zombie ants” a model system to study the concept of parasitic behavioral manipulation in detail."

She's patient zero.

I suspect that it's not Amazon directly changing the price, but some of the other vendors, and Amazon matching. Other sizes are offered at prices up to $85 at both Amazon and other vendors.

McCabe software has a tool that's supposed to find duplicate code within a code base (e.g. cut-n-pasted functions), using path analysis. They have been around for ages, but I've never used them since they're rather expensive.

If the assumption that the ratio of births is 50/50, then no. However, a rule requiring parents to have children until they have a boy could lead to evolutionary pressure increasing the ratio of girls born. That is, if the Smiths have 4 girls and one boy their genes will be 4 times more common than those of the Jones with their one boy.

One "hack" is the pomodoro technique. Do about 20 minutes of work, then take a five minute break. This avoids burning out trying to work for hours on end, finding that you've accomplished very little.

Interesting: "The country is currently home to more than 50,000 businesses that are over 100 years old. Of those, 3,886 have been around for more than 200 years. As a point of comparison, only one in every four U.S. companies founded in 1994 was still operating in 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

The "point of comparison" is nothing of the kind. There's no indication of what ratio of new businesses in Japan survive their first 20 years. Look up survivor bias.

And while we're discussing it, 80% of people carrying cash are not drug smugglers, and 80% of people using Waze to watch for traffic cops are not cop-killers. Are we seeing a trend here?

Kinda over the top, dontcha think? I had measles as a child, and it was hardly "devastating". Chart seems to be missing any indication of the percentage of people vaccinated, so that one can at least see a correlation, let alone infer causation, or "impact"! And since Disneyland is a tourist spot, isn't it at least possible that some of the guests could be people from countries which don't vaccinate for measles? That is assuming that the strain of the current measles outbreak is the same one prevented by the vaccine.

Summary: Big companies use their size and power as an advantage, to the detriment of the common man. Proposed solution: more laws.

Meanwhile in the real world: the reasons these companies are able to maintain their monopolies include the fact that compliance with regulations is too prohibitive for small businesses, regulatory capture, and government support (direct and indirect) for monopolies and oligopolies.

Labor unions? Ha! they proved themselves to be just as monopolistic and exploitive as the "big bad capitalists" they claim to oppose.

Might be a better idea to sunset laws which have outlived their usefulness and give the small guys a chance against the top-heavy monopolies.

It's not really the "sharing economy". They are using the secondary wifi access points as a paid service to other subscribers.

In their defense, though, the routers are theirs, and they do allow users to turn off the secondary wifi access point. I don't have Comcast, but I'd be willing to put up with this if: (1) I'm able to opt out (2) I get some discount for physically hosting their access point, (3) Needless to say, the secondary traffic must not affect my use of the internet connection: e.g. reducing my own bandwidth, or counting against my quotas.

The article seems to assume that there will be one researcher or research organization producing one AI. This makes it reasonable to propose asking it a super-special question that reduces the risk.

It's more likely that armies of researchers will be competing to create quantities of ever-smarter AI's: for trading stocks, diagnosing illness, or managing enterprises. We have AI systems now which try to detect fraud--conceivably fraudsters could create AI systems to more cleverly hide fraud. Any of these efforts could lead to a "chain-reaction" of AI extension, which the author terms an explosion.

Back in the day, I tried a program called something like Biz Plan Writer. It helped to organize ideas around the new business (e.g. revenue projections) and put together a business plan which could be presented to potential investors. It left the validation and marketing to the humans, though.

Interesting. But what's the difference whether there is a physical lower limit to distance or not? Can it be applied to help make an ansible, for instance?